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Increasingly, people are tracking their every move

There's an explosion in the sale and use of "smart wearables," and some are collecting data on just about everything they do.

Torontonian Sacha Chua collects data on how she spends her time and other aspects of her life. (Michelle Siu for the Toronto Star)

By Mark MannSpecial to the Star

Mon., Jan. 19, 2015

A secret sickness is plaguing our society, and it affects us all: we’re not good enough.

We dream of the bright, healthy person we’re meant to be — the one who eats kale chips, goes jogging before work and very rarely binge-watches television. But always after a few weeks or months of striving, our willpower starts to wobble and eventually pitches forward into the dust. We go back to wasting time between snacks, fat, lazy and doomed to die early.

If that assessment sounds harsh, consider the recent explosion of wearable tracking devices, such as Fitbit, Nike+ FuelBand SE and Jawbone’s Up. The market value of these so-called smart wearables is expected to more than double this year, jumping from $2.5 to $5.2 billion, according to the website Techvibes. One in five Americans plans to buy a fitness tracker in 2015.

The promise of these devices is simple: they will help us to finally live up to our good intentions (and maybe even our New Year’s resolutions), by allowing us to “hack” our motivation.

Perhaps without realizing it, all those people rushing to buy fitness trackers are joining an established trend that predates smartphones. The movement received its name in 2007 when journalist Gary Wolf teamed up with Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, to start the Quantified Self blog. But data junkies have been computing their own behaviours and experiences since the dawn of the digital era. Now, as more and more people get in the habit of checking their sleep cycles and workout stats every day, self-hacking has finally gone mainstream.

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Most people now associate hacking with North Korean saboteurs or the grinning white masks of the Anonymous group, but for Sacha Chua, hacking just means experimenting. Chua adopted a scientific approach to her own life more than a decade ago, and she has been diligently compiling and analyzing her personal data ever since, publishing the results in daily posts on her blog Living an Awesome Life.

She is also one of the organizers of Toronto’s Quantified Self meet-up group, a loose gathering of about 30 like-minded people who get together every six weeks to give updates on their personal experiments and deliver presentations on such topics as quantifying personality or the patterns in their Starbucks purchases.

The group meets at Hacklab, a nexus of DIY geekery that opened in Parkdale in October after moving from a smaller location in Kensington Market. The lab boasts a shared 3D printer and laser cutter (a display case beside the printer shows member creations: several engine models, the green plastic bust of Yoda and a replica head of broccoli, among others), as well as myriad tools and parts for building devices. Members tinker at long tables in the workroom, gather for info-sharing sessions in the spacious conference room or do some quiet reading of titles like Cryptography Engineering in the comfy alcove at the back.

Chua welcomes me with her characteristic wide grin and we head to the lounge, where she immediately starts timing our conversation on her computer. The serene-looking 30-year-old dresses plainly, in a simple T-shirt and cargo pants, and wears her long black hair in a braid that dangles over her shoulder. She has a round face and an open, attentive expression that often breaks into pleasant laughter, usually at her own expense as she describes her various idiosyncrasies. There are quite a few.

Chua has posted to her blog 6,985 times in the past 14 years, which is to say, almost every day and sometimes multiple times daily. She tries to “think out loud” and share as much as she can, because she relies on feedback from others to improve her ideas and, as she says, “I like to be able to search my brain with Google.” Apart from her reflections and observations, she also posts the results from her various tracking experiments, such as the exact number of times she wears each article of clothing she owns.

Chua is the sort of person who sets up a motion-tracking camera to determine why one of her cats — nicknamed Data Generator — isn’t using the litter box. (Answer: it doesn’t like going second.) She also makes a detailed study of her library withdrawals, things she forgets or misplaces, and how she spends every minute of her life.

Chua calls herself a “personal finance geek,” and one day found herself reflecting on the old adage “Time is money.” She thought, “Hey, I already track my finances. Why don’t I track my time as well?” Keeping a record of events is as old as scratching on the cave wall, but Chua takes it to a new level. She’s broken her activities into 12 categories and more than 100 sub-categories, which allows her to create detailed annual reports and chart her behaviour on a grand scale.

In 2014, Chua spent 2,071 hours on business (she makes money in a variety of ways, including self-publishing, but prefers to offer the fruits of her labour for free as much as possible), 1,559 hours on discretionary activities such as socializing and hobbies, 1,273 hours on personal activities like eating and exercising, and 3,220 hours sleeping. Anyone can check her public dashboard, quantifiedawesome.com, which serves as a digital hub for most of her tracking activities. and find out what she’s up to at any given moment. At the time of this writing, she’s eating lunch.

But most people arrive at self-tracking for personal rather than scientific reasons. Until 2013, Valerie Howes, a 40-year-old Toronto-based food and travel writer, had been only an occasional runner, and she regretted her lack of long-term self-discipline. Then she downloaded RunKeeper, an app that uses your smartphone’s GPS system to track how far and fast you go when you run. Since she started tracking, she’s run consistently, covering 432 kilometres and burning over 30,000 calories. Her on-again/off-again relationship with running has become a real commitment.

“I get kind of obsessive about how I’ve done this week compared to last week, and how fast I ran this distance compared to last time,” Howes says. “I find it really motivating.”

The app often sends notifications to let you know when you’ve reached a personal best. “It’s like being a kid with a star chart,” she observes, laughing.

But not everyone is so satisfied with the results of their personal-tracking. Odette Faronda, a 60-year-old finance manager in Toronto, was given a Fitbit Flex last year for Christmas. Worn as a bracelet, its sensor is billed as an activity monitor, giving users stats about how many steps they take, how many calories they burn and how much sleep they get. Faronda made fun of it at first. “What is this thing going to tell me, that I’m asleep when I’m sleeping?” she used to joke.

But Faronda also wanted to lose the 20 pounds she’d put on since her osteoporosis diagnosis 10 years earlier, which had made her more cautious about injuring herself during exercise. So, after hesitating for a month, she started wearing the device to see if it would help. At first, it did, and she lost five pounds in a few months. But like many others who start out collecting self-data with any of the wearable devices on the market, it wasn’t long before she stopped paying attention.

According to a study done last year, one-third of Americans who wear a tracking device stop using it in the first six months.

For losing weight, what worked for Faronda was fear. In October 2014 she found out she was pre-diabetic, and from that point on she started controlling her diet more carefully. “The kind of tracking I do is I measure my portions,” she says. “I use the good old measuring cups.”

The Fitbit tells the story: in the three months prior to her diagnosis, she averaged 6,931 steps per day and lost 2.3 pounds. In the three months following, she averaged a similar 7,256 steps per day but lost almost 11 pounds. From Faronda’s perspective, the data reveals its own irrelevance. It’s what she ate that mattered. “I can do without this thing,” she concludes. “I won’t miss it.”

In order to eat well (or exercise more, or keep a budget, or spend time more wisely), you need the willpower, and for those who haven’t been scared straight, that’s exactly the problem. Self-hacking offers hope for an alternative.

“When people talk about motivation, they’re often saying, ‘I could do this if only I could force myself,’ ” Chua observes. Many try the stick approach, such as writing a cheque to a charity they despise and promising to mail it if they fail. Instead, Chua suggests starting from small wins and frequent progress.

“If I fall off the habit, one approach would be to castigate myself for it, and another approach would be to ask, ‘How can I make doing the right thing easier than not doing it?’ ” she says. “So we’re back to experiments.”

Self-hacking with wearable devices may not take you where you want to go, but it will give you a pretty good idea of where you are right now. And that’s a smart place to start out.

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